Subha Xavier

Associate Professor, French

Subha Xavier, Associate Professor (Ph.D. in French Literature, University of Wisconsin-Madison) Migration and Diaspora Studies, Francophone African, Canadian and Caribbean Literature and Film, Postcolonial and Literary Theory. Core faculty at the Institute of African Studies and the Global and Postcolonial Studies Program. Associated faculty in Film and Media Studies.

Professor Xavier’s first book, The Migrant Text: Making and Marketing a Global French Literature (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2016) brings together a corpus of recent novels by immigrants to France and Quebec, suggesting that these diverse works extend beyond familiar labels such as francophone and postcolonial to forge a new mode of writing that deserves recognition on its own terms. Xavier shows how both external and internal factors shape migrant production in contemporary French literature, arguing that these texts should be situated precisely at the intersection of the financial mandates of literary production and the textual strategies the writer deploys to resist—but also profit from—these conditions.

Xavier has published articles on Quebec and Franco-Algerian cinema, Sino-French and Sino-Canadian literature, theories of world literature and Francophonie in the Journal of Quebec Studies, Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies, Francophone Studies, The French Review and The International Journal of Canadian Studies. She has forthcoming articles on Calixthe Beyala and Afro-feminism in Revue Zizanies, Alain Mabanckou and Black Cosmopolitanism in Les Textes migrants de l’Afrique subsaharienne and on current debates and the role of literature in Migration and Diaspora Studies in New Directions in Postcolonial Studies, ed. Jenni Ramone, Bloomsbury Press (2016).

She is currently working on her second book, China and France in Love: Creativity and Failure in Contemporary Sino-French Literature, which examines a long history of literary interplay between China and France in order to read recent cultural production by the Chinese diaspora in France as an extension and reversal of an age-old seduction with otherness.

Other works in progress include a co-edited volume, Les Textes migrants de l’Afrique subsaharienne and articles on literature and human rights in the DRC, Sino-French literature in translation and the poetry and painting of Shan Sa.